Profile of Bob Evans
News & Commentary Posts: 1070
Bob Evans is senior VP, communications, for Oracle Corp. He is a former InformationWeek editor.
Articles by Bob Evans
posted in February 2010
2/28/2010
Riddle me this: Oracle's integrated systems limit competition, which is bad, but it should kill Sparc to limit Wintel competition, which is good.
2/24/2010
"It's amazing how many CIOs are visiting Apple and are interested in the Mac," Apple COO Tim Cook said Tuesday, noting that the old enterprise fixation on standardization is giving way to a focus on creativity. Cook made those and other scintillating comments at a Goldman Sachs investors conference.
2/24/2010
TelePresence suites help Starwood Hotels innovate today and be relevant to the tech-immersed business travelers of tomorrow.
2/23/2010
As the social web's business value has outstripped security concerns, CIOs have begun buying, RightNow claims.
2/23/2010
The good news: 39% of CIOs are in good shape. The bad news: 61% fall into the lethal categories.
2/23/2010
GoodData's technology, management philosophy, and "market-disruptive price point" have helped Enterasys drive more business value from IT.
2/22/2010
In trying to force web viewers to watch the Olympics on NBC's terms, the network showed how pathetically out of touch it is with that vital audience.
2/22/2010
While this 37-second YouTube video won't be confused with Citizen Kane, it does provide a striking perspective on the massive, remote, expensive, and indispensable digital powerhouses behind the cloud computing platform. And just think of the marketing opportunity: Apple could put a logo the size of New Jersey on the roof.
2/22/2010
Well-done global IT-asset management can turn beancounting into strategic insight—and generate big savings.
2/21/2010
IBM's counterattacking on multiple fronts, emphasizing 50 years in optimized systems and questioning Oracle's abilities.
2/21/2010
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reaffirmed Saturday that Sun's formerly unprofitable operations will become profitable "right away" as part of Oracle. That follows his promises late last month that Sun will be hiring more people than it lets go, and that Oracle's prize acquisition will turn a profit this month (February).
2/19/2010
With global IP traffic in 2013 expected to top 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (half a zettabyte, which is one trillion gigabytes), IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is warning that "our country will not be prepared for a new world that is increasingly built on the fusion of the physical and the digital" without a huge national broadband upgrade driven by private-sector funding and "enlightened" government policy.
2/18/2010
HP's chopped $1B from annual R&D spending but is cranking out more dynamic new products than ever. What's Hurd's secret?
2/18/2010
CIOs need to redefine their roles and boundaries in today's age of lean IT and customer-centric business.
2/17/2010
In the past year we've made candid suggestions to each of those executives via open letters -- were our ideas on target?
2/17/2010
Microsoft business software president Stephen Elop says the company's June launch of Office 2010 will include a cloud-based version that will result in more revenue and profit for Microsoft because the company will end up "doing much more work for the customer."
2/17/2010
Calling estimates that he spent $400 million in his bid to win the America's Cup "a little high," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that winning the racing competition was like running his high-profile enterprise software company: "Everybody sees the sailing teams, but there's an awful lot behind them."
2/16/2010
Will this large, complex, and deeply strategic energy deal help HP shake the tired tag of world's biggest PC maker?
2/16/2010
Although the only thing I know about sailing is that when you throw up you shouldn't do it into the wind, it has been fascinating to read about the unprecedented innovations Oracle CEO Larry Ellison brought to his high-tech sailboat that recently thrashed Ellison's rivals from Team Alinghi and brought the America's Cup home. Here are a few highlights.
2/16/2010
SuccessFactors' compelling product strategy, customer-centric mission, and dynamic CEO are turning the software business upside-down.
2/14/2010
While profits remain enormously important to SAP, co-founder and chairman Hasso Plattner said in public comments last week that if SAP were to try to stifle another particularly vital imperative for the sake of profits, "that could kill the company."
2/14/2010
While layoffs can be heartbreaking, they're also an indispensable fact of life in the dynamic global IT business.
2/12/2010
Jobs and the iPad are revolutionizing the book business while picking a big fight with Amazon. What can you learn?
2/12/2010
In what must be sweet comfort to his two newly named co-CEOs, SAP chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner has vowed not to interfere in daily operations. That pledge comes just several days after Plattner promised to "do everything possible to make SAP a happy company again" and as he is deeply involved in a sweeping overhaul of the company's development processes and customer relations.
2/11/2010
Today's young tech wizards have huge potential but jarring behavior, Accenture says—how do you harness the former and understand the latter?
2/11/2010
The latest addition to the exotic new-wave data centers we wrote about recently-including an ice-cooled former NATO command center in Iceland and a new tourist attraction at Disney World-is Hewlett-Packard's 360,000-square-foot UK facility cooled by the bracing winds from the nearby North Sea.
2/10/2010
Is it the big screen, or the Apple magic, or the software? And will CIOs shortlist or blacklist?
2/10/2010
"We are beginning to see some action, beginning to see purse strings loosening," according to an IBM executive leading its global delivery business in India. That comment, from a Wall Street Journal article, would mark quite a turnaround from a few months ago when IBM's CFO declined to make any comment on corporate IT spending.
2/9/2010
Ten very candid suggestions on overhauling SAP's value proposition, corporate culture, commitment to the cloud, competitive outlook and more.
2/9/2010
Calling it "one of the most perverse things I have heard," the CIO of the U.K.'s Revenue and Customs branch said he was warned by Cabinet officials that if he were to find creative ways to cut his $1.2 billion IT budget by 50%, he would be dropped from a top-level group that shapes government purchasing policy and strategy.
2/9/2010
Extending its wide-ranging strategic relationship with Vodafone, Oracle has picked the giant mobile-phone operator to supply more than 16,000 Oracle EMEA employees with voice, data, and management services.
2/8/2010
SAP will fix its technology, but its entire future depends on whether it can fix how it views and treats its customers.
2/8/2010
Ralph Szygenda, General Motors' longtime CIO who retired late last year, is joining rapidly growing software firm iRise as a strategic consultant to create a CIO advisory council focused on defining and leading IT transformation and understanding the potential of enterprise visualization in those large-scale efforts.
2/7/2010
CIOs need to redefine their roles and boundaries in today's age of lean IT and customer-centric business.
2/7/2010
Squeezing 2.2% revenue growth out of recession-racked 2009, SAS posted record revenue of $2.31 billion while plowing 23% of that total, or about $530 million, back into R&D. And the company also said it kept its promise on layoffs.
2/4/2010
Analysts are bullish on two very different companies, Oracle and RightNow: what does this tell us about the enterprise IT market?
2/4/2010
Microsoft is choking to death on its internal politics and corrosive infighting, says a former executive.
2/3/2010
For data integration and MDM, everybody's got a story--but which ones are right?
2/3/2010
Cisco India plans to double its workforce in the next 23 months from 5,000 to 10,000, but a company official expressed concern that the rapidly growing demand for IT talent in India could be outstripping supply. Cisco's plan comes as IBM and EMC are also undertaking massive expansion plans in India.
2/2/2010
Strong and profitable growth, great technology, a red-hot market, and $500M in revenue: what's not to like?
2/2/2010
PepsiCo plans to install Cisco TelePresence systems in major offices around the world to help it work more closely with leading distributors and retailers. The huge deal will "reinvent the way we work," said PepsiCo Global CIO Robert Dixon.
2/2/2010
Has Windows 7 had a big impact on Microsoft's frustrated customers and on Microsoft's bruised reputation? According to one study, Microsoft posted a bigger boost in customer-satisfaction scores after the Win7 rollout than ultracool Apple did after its release of Snow Leopard. That news, plus its strong financial results this week, give Microsoft some much-needed momentum.
2/1/2010
Promising to improve installation and support for Oracle-Sun products at Sun's 4,000 top customers, Oracle's Larry Ellison said the new company must "do a better job" of "working with those customers to make sure they get [Sun technology] installed successfully and running successfully." He didn't say so explicitly, but Ellison's implied message to Sun resellers and integrators: better give HP a call.
2/1/2010
"Unfortunately for high-performance computing lovers everywhere, there was nary a mention of HPC in Oracle's merger party on Wednesday," says HPCwire. "And while nothing was explicitly said to indicate Sun's HPC customers would be ditched, Oracle's focus right now is obviously on business computing, not scientific computing." What's the future for HPC at Oracle/Sun?